The Novel and the Menagerie

The Novel and the Menagerie Totality, Englishness, and Empire Kurt Koenigsberger The Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 2007 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Koenigsberger, Kurt. The novel and the menagerie : totality, Englishness, and empire / Kurt Koe- nigsberger. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978–0–8142–1057–4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–0–8142– 9136–8 (cd-rom) 1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. 2. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 3. National charac- teristics, English, in literature. 4. Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature. 5. Whole and parts (Philosophy) in literature. 6. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century. 7. Literature and society—Great Britain— History—20th century. 8. Social institutions in literature. 9. Imperialism in literature. I. Title. PR878.3557K64 2007 823'.809358--dc22 2007000236 Cover design by Dan O’Dair. Type set in Minion. Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc.. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Aidan Contents List of Illustrations vii Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction The Novel as Zoo: Animal Stories and English Style 1 Chapter 1 Picturing Britannia’s Menagerie: The Aesthetics of the Imperial Whole 32 Chapter 2 Circuses in Cabinets: The Victorian Novelist as Beast Tamer 82 Chapter 3 Elephants in the Labyrinth of Empire: Arnold Bennett, Modernism, and the Menagerie 118 Chapter 4 Monsters on the Verandah of Realism: Virginia Woolf’s Empire Exhibition 149 Chapter 5 The “Anglepoised” Novel after Empire: English Creatures and Postcolonial Exhibition 182 Epilogue Small Islands, Frozen Arks 212 Notes 219 Bibliography 245 Index 261 Illustrations Figure 1 Queen Elizabeth II and Runga-Rung Elephant, The Daily Telegraph, 10 May 2002. Photograph by Ian Jones/Telegraph Group Limited. 2 Figure 2 “Mr. Punch’s Celebration of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, 1886,” Punch’s Almanack for 1886, Punch, 7 December 1885. Courtesy Kelvin Smith Library Retrospective Research Collections. 3 Figure 3 “Punchius Imperator a.d. MDCCCLXXVII,” Punch’s Almanack for 1877, Punch, 14 December 1876. Courtesy Kelvin Smith Library Retrospective Research Collections. 8 Figure 4 Sir Edwin Landseer, Isaac Van Amburgh and His Animals (1839). The Royal Collection © 2007 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. 41 Figure 5 Engraving (ca. 1860) after Sir Edwin Landseer, Portrait of Mr. Van Amburgh as He Appeared with His Animals at the London Theatre, 1847. Author’s collection. 42 Figure 6 “Wombwell’s Menagerie in the Great Quadrangle, Windsor Castle,” The Illustrated London News, 6 November 1847. Courtesy Kelvin Smith Library Retrospective Research Collections. 44 Figure 7 “The Royal Visit to Wombwell’s Menagerie,” The Illustrated London News, 6 November 1847. Courtesy Kelvin Smith Library Retrospective Research Collections. 45 Figure 8 Burmese Imperial State Carriage, The Egyptian Hall, 1826. Permission The British Library (Shelfmark Th.Cts.52). 56 Figure 9 Map of the World, Colindian Exhibition, 1886. Permission The British Library (Shelfmark Maps.183.q.1(13)). 63 Figure 10 John Foley’s “Asia,” from the Albert Memorial (1872). Photograph by Kevin Anderson. 64 vii viii Illustrations Figure 11 “Kaiser–I–Hind,” Punch, 13 January 1877. Courtesy Kelvin Smith Library Retrospective Research Collections. 67 Figure 12 W. L. Champney, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” John Godfrey Saxe, Clever Stories of Many Nations (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865). Courtesy Kelvin Smith Library. 69 Figure 13 John Lockwood Kipling, “A Peri on a Camel,” Man and Beast in India (New York: Macmillan, 1892). 73 Figure 14 John Lockwood Kipling, “Krishna on an Elephant,” Man and Beast in India (London: Macmillan, 1892). 74 Figure 15 “Kaniyajee and the Gopees,” Fanny Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (London: Pelham Richardson, 1850). Permission The British Library (Shelfmark 10055.f.20). 75 Figure 16 Composite Elephant (n.d.). Permission Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (Shelfmark MS.Ouseley Add.171b. folio 9 verso). 76 Figure 17 “Destruction of the Furious Elephant at Exeter Change” (1826). Permission The British Library (Shelfmark Crach.1.tab.4.b.4/14). 78 Figure 18 William Makepeace Thackeray, “An Elephant for Sale,” illustration to Chapter XVII of Vanity Fair (1847–48). 85 Figure 19 “The New Lord Mayor’s Show—1850,” The Illustrated London News, 9 November 1850. Courtesy Kelvin Smith Library Retrospective Research Collections. 93 Figure 20 Ad for elephant performances at Astley’s, December 1853. Permission The British Library (Shelfmark Playbill 173). 97 Figure 21 Ad for elephants and “Billy Button’s Journey to Brentford,” 12 January 1854. Permission The British Library (Shelfmark Playbill 171). 98 Figure 22 “The Gorgeous East” at Wembley, The Graphic, 23 August 1924. Permission The British Library (Shelfmark NPL Graphic 24–9–1924 pg.282). 162 Figure 23 Ad for the British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, The Graphic, 24 May 1924. Permission The British Library (Shelfmark NPL Graphic 24–5–1924 pg.834). 165 Figure 24 English creatures at the London Zoo, August 2005. Photograph by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images. 213 Preface The historian of the future will probably find one of the great move- ments of world-history in the forces which are at present making for new ideals of imperial unity throughout the British Empire. —Programme, The Festival of Empire and the Pageant of London (1910) Mr. Thomas Cook . made his countrymen understand what the world was like as a whole. The charm found in Mr. Thomas Cook’s narrative is the novelty of the whole. —W. Fraser Rae, on the story of Thomas Cook and Son travel business (1891) Britannia has a menagerie that reaches all over the world She has some animals rich and rare, some treacherous creatures are caged up there. —“Britannia’s Menagerie,” music hall standard (ca. 1900) The subject of this book is the imperial animal and its English stories, narratives that foreground the “ideals of imperial unity” and that depend upon a notion of the British Empire as a novel and sometimes charming “whole.” The chapters that follow explore the form of the English institutions that collected exotic animals and the shape of the novel in England over the past two centuries. In these pages I trace the precipitous rise and long subsidence of the zoo, menagerie, circus, and colonial exhibition in England, all prime examples of a rich imperial culture of display. These popular ensembles fashioned and framed a range of narrative practices in relation to a prevailing idea of the empire as a comprehensive whole. In its tents, arenas, enclosures, and caravans, the zoological collection managed both alien beasts and their meanings as it advertised, described, and mounted a ix x Preface range of exotic displays that evoked and delineated a burgeoning empire. The menagerie’s spaces of exhibition form the backdrop for my explorations of the novel as the distinctive form of English narrative. In particular I describe the novel’s constellation around the notion of imperial totality in the nineteenth century, its emphasis upon detotalization of form and imperial frames of reference in the era of aesthetic modernism, and its nostalgia for formal holism and an abolished exotic at the end of the twentieth century. In each chapter, I have sought to open new channels for understanding the novel as part of an ongoing public discourse of imperial totality, and the menagerie as a site of genesis and management of English stories about the empire. My title gestures toward a fundamental conjunction of the zoological collection and the English novel, but their relation is far from simple; indeed, much of chapter 1 is devoted to mapping the cultural topography of empire in which both institutions took root and flourished. Broadly speaking, though, my approach to the subject emphasizes two primary roles for the collection of zoological exotica. First, the menagerie appears as a cultural form homologous to the novel to the extent that both the novel and the menagerie share a sense of the empire as the preeminent expression of English spirit, but also as something that England’s domestic cultures struggle to grasp in its total aspect. In this respect, the novel and the menagerie represent comparable imaginative responses to the empire as a dominant, shaping factor in English daily life. They share important aesthetic strategies and cultural logics, and consequently both the novel and the menagerie are illuminated when we read them with one another—the novel as a collection of everyday imaginative practices, and the menagerie as an institution generating and managing narratives of empire. Second, the menagerie mediates the novel’s relation to empire and to Englishness. That is, as a popular and distinct site for the production and direction of narratives of empire, the collection of zoological exotica furnishes the novel with material and figures for its own forms and practices. The appearance of the zoo, the circus, a traveling collection of animals, or an individual beast—tiger, elephant, camel, or boa constrictor, for instance—in the novel invites us to read through the menagerie to the exotic landscape it evokes and imaginatively maps. The aim of these pages is less to theorize the movement of the English novel since the Victorian era than to historicize and contextualize some key terms in its traditional theory and practice: “life,” “perspective,” and especially “totality” or “whole.” Though the theory of the novel—especially the theory of the novel as a total object in its form and as a totalizing instrument in its aim—is usually understood to begin in earnest with Henry James’s prefaces to his novels, narrative praxis in the nineteenth century implies a set of theoretical principles even when Preface xi they are not codified in an apology, pamphlet, preface, or review.

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